People sometimes think of trauma as the terrible thing that happened.

An assault. Abuse in childhood. Violence in a relationship. An accident. A frightening experience. A betrayal by someone who should have been safe.

But in my work, I think about trauma somewhat differently.

The event is what happened to you. Trauma is what can be left behind.

It is the scar rather than the original wound.

The event may have happened ten, twenty, thirty or even fifty years ago. Life may have moved on. You may have built a career, raised a family, had relationships, paid the mortgage, looked after everyone else and become very good at simply getting on with things.

And yet something of that earlier experience may still be carried with you.

“I dealt with that years ago.”

This is something I hear, particularly from adults who experienced difficult or abusive childhoods.

For many people, surviving meant adapting.

Perhaps there wasn't anyone safe to tell. Perhaps nobody asked. Perhaps you learned very early that talking about what happened wouldn't change anything. You may even have believed that what happened wasn't serious enough to matter.

So you got on with life.

For some men especially, this can mean decades of keeping difficult experiences firmly contained: work, family, responsibilities, sport, mates, relationships and the ordinary demands of life take priority.

That doesn't mean the person has been consciously “avoiding” their past every day. Often they have simply learned how to live around it.

And this is important: taking many years to speak about childhood abuse or trauma is not unusual. Australian research has found that many survivors do not disclose childhood sexual abuse until adulthood, while some never disclose it at all. Men are less likely than women to disclose, and historical research has found that men may take decades before speaking about what happened.